The scagliola tables are arrived, and only one has suffered a little on the edge:  the pattern is perfectly pretty.  It would oblige me much if you could make the Friar make a couple more for me, and with a little more expedition.

Don’t be so humble about your pedigree:  there is not a pipe of good blood in the kingdom but we will tap for you:  Mr. Chute has it now in painting; and you may depend on having it with the most satisfactory proofs, as soon as it can possibly be finished.  He has taken great pains, and fathomed half the genealogies in England for you.

You have been extremely misinformed about my father’s writing his own history:  I often pressed it, but he never once threw a thought that way.  He neither loved reading nor writing; and at last, the only time he had leisure, was not well enough.  He used to say, “that but few men should ever be ministers, for it let them see too much of the badness of mankind.”  Your story, I imagine, was inoculated on this speech.  Adieu!

(69) Thomas Barrett-Lennard, afterwards Lord Dacre of the South, and his wife, Anne, daughter of Lord Chief Justice Pratt, afterwards Lord Camden.

(70) The French minister at Florence.

(71) The brother of Madame de Mirepoix, afterwards a marshal of France.-D.

(72) There is said to have been another equally absurd picture in the same family, in which Noah is represented going into the ark, carrying under his arm a small trunk, on which was written “Papiers de la maison de Levis."-D.

42 Letter 12 To George Montagu, Esq.  Strawberry Hill, August 26, 1749.

Dear George, I flatter myself that you are quite recovered of your disorder, and that your sisters will not look with an evil eye on Strawberry Hill.  Mr. Chute and I are returned from our expedition miraculously well, considering all our distresses.  If you love good roads, conveniences, good inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as never to go into Sussex.  We thought ourselves in the northest part of England; the whole country has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage, as if King George the Second had been the first monarch of the East Angles.  Coaches grow there no more than balm and spices; we were forced to drop our postchaise, that resembled nothing so much as harlequin’s calash, which was occasionally a chaise or a baker’s cart.  We journeyed over Alpine mountains, drenched in clouds, and thought of harlequin again, when he was driving the chariot of the sun through the morning clouds, and so was glad to hear the aqua vitae man crying a dram.  At last we got to Arundel Castle, which was visibly built for defence in an impracticable country.  It is now only a heap of ruins, with a new indifferent apartment clapt up for the Norfolks, when they reside there for a week or a fortnight.  Their priest showed us about.  There are the walls of a round tower where the garrison held out against Cromwell; he planted a battery on the top of